musical musings from the frozen north:
torontopia, mont royal city and kawartha kottages

Monday, January 27, 2014

Nick Buzz - A Quiet Evening At Home

The best album of 2013 that I didn’t get around to reviewing
until 2014:

Nick Buzz – A Quiet Evening at Home (Six Shooter)

Martin Tielli and Nick Buzz released their long-awaited second
album (17 years after their first) on 2013’s Labour Day weekend, a hectic time
of year, both in life and for new releases. That’s going to be my excuse for
only coming to fully appreciate the genius of A Quiet Evening at Home now, four
months later. Nick Buzz is music best experienced during hibernation: it’s
complex, operatic, layered and cinematic.

Tielli, who helped redefine Canadian rock with the Rheostatics,
is the voice and lyricist of Nick Buzz; anyone who’s ever loved his music needs
to hear this, which is the most fascinating work he’s done since his 2001 solo
debut.

But his bandmates are absolutely integral; this is a project
where long-suffering sidemen all deserve equal billing: violinist Hugh Marsh,
Jonathan Goldsmith and Rob Piltch, all of whom played with Bruce Cockburn or
Mary Margaret O’Hara or both. Here, they combine decades of experience in
improvisation, soundtracks, folk and art music to craft cabaret music from an
avant-garde radio play.

Tielli’s songs are fully formed enough to be played
unaccompanied (“The Happy Matador” could be a Spanish folk song), but Nick Buzz
pull everything apart, inserting arpeggiating synths, textural violins,
distorted kalimbas, classical piano and ambient textures to create something
much larger and immersive. There are no obvious nods to time or place, to
obvious influence or innovation: “Stop living in the past / forget about
tomorrow,” sings Tielli.

If the music is otherworldly, Tielli’s lyrics convey narrators
out of time, out of step and coping with loss. He’s bewildered, bemused and
occasionally fantastical: “The Hens Lay Everyday” is set to a crunching
electronic beat and Beach Boy harmonies, with lyrics about a musical virus that
consumes everyone who hears it: “And those who can’t dance will be able to
dance / and those who can will die.”

If there is any comparison to be made here, it is to Scott
Walker, the enigmatic American expat crooner who started out in the late ’60s
trying to channel Jacques Brel (there’s a fantastic Brel cover on this Nick
Buzz album) and became progressively more abstract and strange with age. Tielli
has covered Walker before; he’s nowhere near as abrasive and obtuse as Walker
is now, but they are definitely similar travellers.

This group is old, weird, out of the loop, and Canadian—it’s
hard to envision a marketing strategy. Like any run-of-the-mill, slow-burning,
richly rewarding art rock masterpiece, it’s easy for this Nick Buzz album to
disappear quickly into the ether. Don’t let it happen. (Jan. 9)